Household Credit and Local Economic Uncertainty

Economic Uncertainty, Disagreement, and Credit Markets

We study the link between credit spreads and the heterogeneous formation of expectations in an economy where agents with different perception of economic uncertainty disagree about future cash flows of a defaultable firm. The intertemporal risk-sharing of disagreeing investors gives rise to three testable implications: First, larger belief heterogeneity increases credit spreads and their volati...

Household Credit

This paper surveys the existing literature on the determinants of household savings and credit in developing countries and examines the ways in which macro-level policies might impact on household financial behaviour.

Consumer Credit and Household Finances

In the 1990s, borrowing by households has grown quickly. In the early part of the decade, the growth was driven by housing lending (Graph␣ 1). More recently, growth in other personal borrowings has picked up sharply. particularly the widespread introduction of loan products enabling households to draw on equity in their owner-occupied property. This type of loan gives explicit recognition, in t...

Bank Credit and Economic Activity

The role of banks in regional as well as in national economic fluctuations has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years. With what seems like amazing prescience, Bernanke and Blinder (1988) recently revived the theoretical literature on the role of bank credit typically associated with Brunner and Meltzer (1972). The trickle of empirical papers written before the 1990s that focused ...

Uncertainty in Economic Analysis and the Economic Analysis of Uncertainty∗